Russia's war in Ukraine is fundamentally an attempt to relitigate the post-Cold War settlement in Europe, and that attempt has already failed regardless of the conflict's eventual outcome, Michael Kofman has argued.
Kofman, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, offered this assessment during a discussion with Kennan Institute director Michael Kimmage, as "Hvylya" reports.
"However this war ends, it's very obvious that this is a failed attempt to relitigate that settlement by Russia," Kofman said. The settlement he referred to is the security architecture that emerged after the Soviet collapse, in which the United States maintained its role as the leading power managing European security, and Central and Eastern European states chose their own strategic orientation toward NATO and the EU.
Kofman framed the war as the latest and most dramatic in a series of what he called "wars of Soviet succession" - conflicts driven by the ongoing aftershocks of the Soviet Union's dissolution. The collapse, he argued, was "both an event and a process," and the aftershocks have "reverberated louder as we get further from the epicenter."
At the core of Russia's frustration was the question of "who writes the rules" in Europe. Moscow sought to dictate security outcomes and retain influence over its neighbors. But NATO and EU enlargement steadily locked Russia out of that role. Kofman described NATO expansion as being primarily about "the loss of Russian status and the fact that it essentially locks Russia out from being able to recover influence."
The war was meant to reverse this trajectory and demonstrate that Moscow could still impose its will on European security. Instead, it has accelerated the very processes Russia sought to halt - deepening Ukraine's Western integration and reinforcing the transatlantic security framework that Moscow had tried to dismantle.
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